What's your real maximum bid?
A free bid calculator for Philadelphia sheriff sales and Pennsylvania upset and judicial tax sales. No login required — enter your own title-search numbers and see the full math, not a black-box estimate.
This tool does arithmetic on the numbers you enter. It does not know what's recorded against any specific property, and it never decides which liens survive a sale — you do, per row. Run a title search and talk to a Pennsylvania real-estate attorney before you bid. See which liens survive a Philadelphia sheriff sale? for the legal picture.
Step 1 — Sale type
This sets the starting assumptions for which liens usually count — change any of them below once you've picked.
Step 2 — The property
Step 3 — Liens & claims from your title search
Sale type changed — starting assumptions were re-applied to any row you hadn't manually adjusted.
Nothing entered. If you haven't run a title search yet, this number is unknown — not zero.
Step 4 — Costs
Who pays this on a sheriff's deed isn't settled from official sources yet — left empty on purpose. See the explainer below.
combined realty transfer tax — who pays is negotiated. (source)
Step 5 — Your target
What if I bid $___?
Pro gives you the full workbook
Pro gives you the full workbook for every upcoming sale — assessment record, area value, price per square foot and the nearest recorded sales — the inputs for this worksheet, for every property, not just the one you're looking at now.
See what's in ProGet each new sale list by email — then run the numbers on it
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How the math works
The calculator starts from the value you're underwriting to and subtracts, in order: resale costs (as a percent of that value), the liens and claims you've marked "count this toward my cost," your other costs (rehab, holding, possession, title and legal work, transfer tax, and anything else), and your target profit. What's left is the maximum bid — the highest number you can pay at auction and still hit every number above it.
Sale type matters because it changes which liens are likely to survive. Philadelphia's tax-lien sheriff sales are court-ordered free-and-clear sales under the Municipal Claims and Tax Liens Act — most liens are wiped, so the calculator starts with only federal liens (which have their own carve-out) and an open "other" category counted by default. Philadelphia's mortgage-foreclosure sales run on ordinary lien-priority rules instead, so everything starts counted until you know the recording order and can uncheck what's junior to the foreclosing mortgage. Pennsylvania's other 66 counties run upset sales, which convey the property subject to recorded liens — the classic trap — so everything starts counted there too. A property that fails at upset sale can move to a judicial sale, which is free and clear like Philadelphia's, so it starts closer to that shape.
None of these starting positions are a legal conclusion about your specific property. They're a reasonable default given the sale type, and every single one is a checkbox you can change. The tool tracks which rows you've touched, so switching sale type only resets the boxes you haven't already decided for yourself.
What the tool can't know: what's actually recorded against a specific parcel, whether notice was proper, whether a property is occupied, or what a resale will really fetch. Those come from your own title search, your own walk-through, and your own comps — the calculator just does the arithmetic once you have them. Read which liens survive a Philadelphia sheriff sale? for the legal detail behind the defaults above.
A few numbers are pre-sourced rather than left for you to guess: the Philadelphia tax-lien sale's $500 registration deposit and $35 processing fee, its 10%-of-bid (minimum $600) down payment due the next business day, and the remaining balance due by the 15th calendar day after the sale — all from the Sheriff's own Conditions of Sale for Tax Sales and Bid4Assets Philadelphia, current as of September 2026. The optional 4.578% resale-cost rate is Philadelphia's own combined Realty Transfer Tax rate. Everything else — who pays transfer tax on a sheriff's deed, mortgage-foreclosure sale terms, and every upset/judicial sale's terms, which are set county by county — starts empty rather than shipping a guessed default. Verify current terms against the official auction site before you bid.